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Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of problems some older developers have is that the culture has shifted. Maybe I'm off the mark, but I feel like older devs come from a world where programming was all about programming and it was less a formal career than it is now.

To succeed in programming, you have to work well in a business. You can't be Linus Torvalds, walking around with a big ego, unless you're so important it's hard to get rid of you.

You have to work with people well, and some of the older people I've worked with seem to understand this less.

Again, not an insult to older devs. Plenty of them are wonderful. And I could be completely wrong. Just an observation.

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I agree with your premise but not your reasons. personally I'm a programmer - I know enough about business to know I don't have good insight.

everyone I talk to doesn't want* a programmer in the older sense. they want people to integrate external large packages. they don't want to to test, they want to prop something up and see if it makes money. they don't want to talk about architecture and features and make plans - they just want to respond on a dime to what the market is saying.

without any value judgement - I personally don't have a lot to offer in that environment. and to varying degrees I think the hiring managers understand that (sadly, quite a number don't)

I agree with you.

I recently started working on a project in which the company had outsourced it to a wordpress shop, despite it not being a wordpress site.

fast forward a few years and no one fully trusts the software so everything it does gets checked/verified by a human, and they're actually hiring people because the workload is too much.

So they brought it in-house, which is where I come in.

And let me tell you, this codebase is horrific. To give you an idea, they needed a progress bar and ended up writing a FSM with the transition between nodes being http redirects. Now, the developers who worked on this wouldn't know what a FSM is if it bit them in the ass, but that's what they built. And the data for detecting if the background processing was still running was duplicated in 3 or 4 places, which means you would get states in this FSM that disagreed with each other about whether or not processing was finished. These pages would literally "argue" with each other over it by redirecting back and forth until the browser threw a too many redirects error.

I came across some code yesterday in which the developers had created a string of multiple insert statements. They then split on the string "INSERT INTO". Said split removes the INSERT INTO from the string. They then looped over the resulting array, prepended "INSERT INTO" back onto the sql and called the DB 1 at a time. I don't think these guys realized you could separate MySQL statements by semicolon.

My point is that the codebase is horrific, written by someone who was used to the style of development you're referring to, and they made an absolute mess.

BUT

To your point. The company realizes how bad the software is and I get a surprising amount of respect when talking about what needs to happen. The result is that we're making great strides towards making improvements, and despite how horrific the code is I find myself enjoying the work because it allows me to have an aspect of my skill set respected that can sometimes get ignored by people because it's not forward facing. Good software dev is boring as shit, so when you're doing it well no one notices.

Also, this post got me to thinking. I should submit that SQL code snippet to the daily wtf.

Ah, speaking of code snippet of the day. Found someone’s code trying to check if a promo-code is already used, and if not to apply it:

    $codes = $db->exec(‘SELECT code from promocode’);
    if (!in_array($myCode, $codes)){
        // use it
    }

Well, that's the thing. Most jobs are 80% stuff you don't want to do and 20% stuff you do. You're not being paid to do your hobby, you're paid to make money for the business and do what your bosses say.

There are many places though that understand writing good code, even if it's boring, is important, and any decent programmer can go fish until they find a workplace like that.

Having a solid older developer around is important even if most of the work is boring. You're there to help the younger folk from making costly mistakes.

> To succeed in programming, you have to work well in a business. You can't be Linus Torvalds, walking around with a big ego, unless you're so important it's hard to get rid of you.

I keep running into the inverse of that at companies. People who put on a smile and a nice demeanor, but then fail to do any actual work and subsequently lie and politic to cover that up, leaving the rest of the group to play cleanup and cover. I've always loved working with the Torvalds, you do your work and all is well.

There's a big difference between being a developer and a programmer. Wrote about it here:

http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/871

In companies that I've worked in, the traits listed would (very roughly) distinguish a junior from senior developer.

There's various ways of describing these levels, but I think programmer/developer is less clear, and seems to suggest programmer almost as a pejorative.

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